Past Lives (2023)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 23, 2025

For a more thorough response to Past Lives, read "See You Then" from Intensely Specific)

Have you ever wondered what your first crush is up to these days? Have you ever typed their name into Facebook or scrolled through their Instagram photos? Have you ever imagined what a life with them might have been like? It’s probably a fleeting thought, and a silly one for sure, but it’s a natural one. What if, you wonder. What if your little kid heart had been prescient? Perhaps you chuckle. Perhaps you sigh.

Part immigrant story and part pragmatic love triangle, Past Lives fictionalizes nostalgia’s gentle nudge in a film about partings and pairings. Written and directed by playwright Celine Song, the film grapples with those connections that should have long ago faded but nevertheless grip us well past their assumed expiration dates.

A quiet drama told in three parts, Past Lives follows childhood sweethearts Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) during three short intervals in their lives. In the first, Nora’s family leaves their home in Seoul to immigrate to Canada, leaving twelve-year-old Hae Sung behind. In the second, Nora and Hae Sung reconnect via Skype during college, chatting for hours about their shared youth and separate futures. In the third, a 36-year-old Hae Sung visits the happily married Nora in New York City, bubbling decades-long questions to the surface.

Because I saw Past Lives in theaters five times, have watched it at home seven more, written a 5,000+ word analysis of it, and encouraged basically every friend and family member to watch it, I struggle to frame my affection for this 2024 Best Picture nominee. It’s my favorite movie of all time, which is to say, I barely remember the experience of watching it without counting couples in Brooklyn Bridge park or ruminating on the symbolism of a stalled Skype session. With favorite movies, I try to space out my rewatches to maintain freshness, but Past Lives invites me to contemplate huge philosophical questions about life, love, and what we owe our childhood selves. I never used Skype, yet I can tell Song understands the digital world that welcomed me during high school and college; that is to say, I feel understood watching Past Lives. It’s why I’ve watched it so often across merely two years.

Since my gushing, glowing praise risks “overhyping” the movie, let me concede a few points. Song’s film is muted and tender to a fault; there’s drama and tension, but everybody’s an adult, so pivotal scenes play out without histrionics. That tempo and understatedness won’t agree with everyone. As always, your mileage may vary.

Aware though I am of those limitations, I still love it. More than anything, Past Lives is a movie about the mechanics and mysteries of what-ifs, and meditating on might-have-beens mesmerizes me. Some people move on from old feelings easily, burying their former selves far below current concerns, but others find those feelings’ fingers digging dirt away on the regular.

Past Lives resonates with the latter.

If you think it might with you, it’s available on Netflix right now. If you don’t have Netflix but want to watch, I’ll happily Venmo the $5 rental fee to the first five staff members who message me. It’s a small price to pay to share something beautiful.

*****

Speaking of our former selves’ desires, I’ve enjoyed writing about movies and sharing those reviews with you here. This was my first time writing on deadline for another person’s publication, and I had fun cosplaying as a movie critic. These all took time, but they offered me a nice release valve from everything else.

Thanks to Adam and everyone for indulging me. Have a great summer. Hopefully, I’ll have a longer form of writing to share with everyone this upcoming fall.

Tangled (2010)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 16, 2025

It’s for extra-textual reasons that the poster for Disney’s Tangled hangs in the back of HL-5. For follicle-challenged me, a movie about magical flowing locks should stoke envy, not warmth, but the story behind the rectangle I face while I teach overwhelms jealousy. I have the same poster hanging at home, too.

Because my affection is so divorced from the film, I’ve tended to overlook how excellent Tangled is. With catchy songs, a winning story, and two clever character arcs, Tangled showcases Disney at its fairytale repackaging best.

After being kidnapped as an infant, Princess Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) grows up unaware of her royal bloodlines but in possession of a rare gift: her hair has revitalizing powers. Her kidnapper, the vain Mother Gothel (Donna Summer), uses that hair to remain perpetually young while securing her access by gaslighting her “daughter” into believing she can never leave their tower home. When the strapping Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi) serendipitously ends up in her living room while evading police, the two set out to answer Rapunzel’s many questions about the dangerous world beyond her cramped home.

Disney released Tangled fifteen years ago, and that age shows. Everything looks fine from a distance, but the character models look rudimentary on a larger modern TV screen. That’s a minor issue in an otherwise gorgeous film that frames lively characters with painting-esque backdrops that evoke a fairytale world. Paired with expressive voice actors, the film overcomes its aged tech, filling the screen with vivid color and a dynamic story beat via a careening screenplay by Dan Fogelman of This Is Us fame.

Watching Tangled last week for the first time in a decade, I found myself newly enlivened by the experience. The songs really do rock, and I don’t just mean forever-favorite duet “I See the Light”; “When Will My Life Begin” and “Mother Knows Best” establish the story’s stars and stakes, while “I’ve Got a Dream” subverts stereotypes in a manner far more profound than I’d ever given it credit for.

Perhaps due to our proximity to year’s end, I realized this week that Tangled is an excellent film for graduates. Rapunzel begins her story trapped inside a small place, yearning to connect and bursting with curiosity about the larger world; by the end, she’s found a new home and family by overcoming her fear and trudging forward into the unknown. There’s a scene in the film where she struggles with her newfound freedom, oscillating between giddy glee and anxious apprehension, and I thought of my classes, many of whom bounce between blow-this-pop-stand dashing out the door and nervous gnawing over the friends and familiarity they’ll flee. Through that lens, I love Tangled for the Class of 2025: Rapunzel wants change yet also fears it. But when she takes the leap, she discovers her place in the wider world waiting beyond her walls.

It’s been a long time since I looked to the future and didn’t see a familiar loop, but I don’t envy Rapunzel any more than I do our soon-to-be graduates. I appreciate the stability that comes with staring at a poster for fourteen years and centering one’s work around the mindset it once inspired.

I hope each Wildcat walking at Golden One next week finds their place and people as Rapunzel does in Tangled, and as many of us have here at Franklin High School.

 

Your Name (2016)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 9, 2025

I first watched Your Name on a bootleg anime website. “Don’t click on any banners,” the recommender instructed me. “Play it safe.”

That first viewing felt surreal. Tipped off to the gorgeous music and production design, I was unprepared for the emotionality of a story, particularly one about star-crossed lovers that blends body-swap farce, disaster flick, and coming-of-age dramedy.

Teenagers Taki and Mitsuha each have bizarre dreams about living alternate lives. When they discover those alternate lives to be one another’s—and not random dreams—their lives entwine, but fate refuses to let them connect. When danger looms for one, each endeavors to prevent devastation and maintain the possibility of one day meeting the other.

Much like Haruki Murakami’s novels, Your Name leans into a magic realism that occasionally disorients me. Some scenes have cultural components outside my perspective, leaving me sure I’m missing something significant. But Your Name wields an urgent intensity that overwhelms my questions. When there’s no real threat, the film grips me, squeezing my heart in a vice as these teens learn about each other and themselves, but things ratchet up to eleven in the second act. There’s tense drama when two not-that-distant worlds collide and the clock ticks ever closer to tragedy.

Still, the defining feature of Your Name is its beauty and artistic craft. I’m no anime connoisseur, but I’ve watched enough to confidently declare that few look and sound like this. Night skies swell with mesmerizing color, while lake water beckons cool and nourishing; the lens flare here’s so vivid you’ll wonder whether it’s actually filmed. Every shot, whether pastoral or urban, is a masterpiece, the music keeps pace with the images, and the score by RADWIMPS incites emotion with every piano keystroke. I use several instrumental pieces from Your Name in my “If You Really Knew Me” playlist for Diamond Day—they’re that soothing, that powerful.

That all of this beautiful art would support a Quantum Leap romance between teenage protagonists would seem to be a misappropriation of resources. How many times have we watched young lovers pining? It’s a trope as old as time! But Your Name is greater than the sum of its parts because it treats the Taki-Mitsuha relationship with cosmic sincerity; yes, there’s a silly body-swap premise, but the filmmakers portray it as a grand, metaphysical tether across time and space, in a way that should be laughably ridiculous but instead pulls me onto its wavelength. Your Name presents its relationships as they feel to the young people within them: epic, all-encompassing, and life-affirming. It’s refreshing.

While you can surely find it online, the streaming service Crunchyroll has Your Name available right now. I technically own the Blu-ray, but considering I loaned it out in 2018 and haven’t seen it since, you’re on your own finding this one.

Rest assured, Your Name is worth some searching.

 

Almost Famous (2000)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 2, 2025

The girl I had a crush on for most of high school was into music.

Everything she said left me spellbound, but her affection for music awed me. The bands, songs, albums, and venues changed every day, but she spoke about it as an astrophysicist does the universe. Music was everywhere. Music was everything.

And I never understood it. We were staring at the same Red Delicious, but I saw an apple and she saw divinity. For that reason—as well as her more than passing resemblance to Kate Hudson—I’ve always watched Almost Famous with a detective’s eye. I watch it every year and remember both her and that chasm between our respective hearts while listening to music (music).

William (Patrick Fugit) is the brilliant but sheltered son of a college professor (Frances McDormand). His hobby of writing about music gets him an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine: write 4000 words about Stillwater, an emerging rock band led by the golden Russell (Billy Crudup) and the jealous Jeff (Jason Lee). This task sends naive William on the road, where he documents the band while discovering himself and falling in love with Stillwater’s persistent fan Penny Lane (Kate Hudson).

All these years later, Almost Famous remains my Rosetta Stone for music. In the beginning, that perspective endeared Cameron Crowe’s film to me. The open road, the wild parties, the endless charisma of a young Crudup—these were my hints, my ciphers, my decoder rings to this other state of being. If you watch Almost Famous as a story about music, there’s reward; it makes me believe that art, emotion, and rhythm form the fabric of existence. Watching now in 2025, I’ve been to concerts big and small; I’ve felt favorite songs vibrating through my ribcage from the front row and joined 70,000+ in performing the chorus for my favorite singer. If ever I could extract some of what she felt in music, now would be the time.

But I’m also older now, and watching again, I marvel at how young Hudson, Fugit, and Crudup look. Instead of feeling this time-displaced wonder, I watch three characters grapple with growing up. I once watched Russell as the “golden god” he declares himself to be, but now I see a man at a crossroads with gray threatening his temples; he’s ready to rise, but also terrified. William and Penny also straddle a critical line: they are children in a mature world, play-acting as theoretical adults extrapolated from still-developing selves. There are no deities here, only flawed, flailing people hoping the wave of music carries them to shore. That sex-drug-rock n’ roll lifestyle they encounter doesn’t appeal to me now anymore than it did while I stared doe-eyed at my crush, but that moment when anything and everything seemed possible? That still does.

Almost Famous is a frolicking coming-of-age film about music. It follows an exciting journey, it features a fantastic cast, and it fictionalizes a world I’ll never know with such vivid realism that it feels almost like I do. It’s a blast. But it’s something greater, too: we all bring something to Almost Famous separate from the film itself, tapping into the last dwindling traces of our dust-coated almosts and long-retired dreams.

That’s almost certainly not what my high school crush meant when her eyes lit up talking about music like it was everything. Or maybe, in some way, it was? Perhaps she already understood that it’s a blessing to think a noun in italics like she did music.

Or to watch a film that convinces you that you do, too.